In the first conception of the institution of chivalry it was doubtless a device of great purity, and contemplated none but highly proper and becoming purposes. Those very features which, in our more sophisticated era, seem to have been the most absurd, or at least fantastic, were, perhaps among its best securities. The sentiment of love, apart from its passion, is what a very earnest people, in a very selfish period, cannot so well understand; but it was this very separation of interests, which we now hold to be inseparable, that constituted the peculiarity of chivalry—the fanciful in its characteristics rendering sentiment independent of passion, and refining the crude desire by the exercise and influence of tastes, which do not usually accompany it. Among the Provençal knights and troubadours, in the palmy days of their progress, love was really the most innocent and the most elevated of sentiments. It seems to have been nursed without guile, and was professed, even when seemingly in conflict with the rights of others, without the slightest notion of wrong doing or offence. It did not vex the temper, or impair the marital securities of the husband, that the beauties of his dame were sung with enthusiasm by the youthful poet; on the contrary, he who gloried in the possession of a jewel, was scarcely satisfied with fortune unless she brought to a just knowledge of its splendors, the bard who alone could convey to the world a similar sense of the value of his treasure. The narrative which we have gathered from the ancient chronicles of Provence, and which we take occasion to say is drawn from the most veracious sources of history, will illustrate the correctness of these particulars.